GIVEAWAY UPDATE – WE HAVE WINNERS! The Rafflecopter has randomly selected two gift card winners! Congratulations to Renee Heinrich and Amy Roper Bourgeois! Look for an email coming soon with your TpT gift cards attached. As an added bonus, if you subscribed to this website during the giveaway, I’ll be sending a special gift your way! It will arrive in your inbox this by

I’m excited to join up with host Secondary Sara and a bunch of outstanding ELA teachers to bring you The Best of The Best of our teaching ideas and ELA resources. Thanks for stopping by! Bell ringers are a terrific way to start a class successfully, focusing your students on the day’s class content, giving you a few minutes to do some clerical work,

Arthur Miller’s play, The Crucible has been a staple of nearly every high school American literature class for years. My American Lit students have read and studied the play for the past decade, but a few years ago, I decided that having them learn about Miller’s connection to the HUAC and completing the 4-Act study guide, wasn’t enough. I wanted them to experience the play

The bell rings–and students immediately start responding to the question on the board, the (ungraded) quiz on a handout, or the prompt on a PowerPoint slide. Bell Ringers have become an effective beginning-of-class routine, focusing and preparing students for the day’s lesson and activities. Some teachers use the information they garner as quick formative assessments while others are grateful to have the 5 minutes a bell ringer

Happy February and Happy Valentine’s Day! I hope that you are absolutely Feeling the Love! Here’s a bit about me: 1) Something you love about teaching: First, last, and always: teenagers. No, seriously, I love the fact that the people I hang out with every day are teenagers, and the people I work with are also love being around them. Teenagers are no longer children and are

Give students a chance to reflect on and repair problematic behaviors with this thought-provoking document. One of the things I enjoy most as a high school teacher is watching the looks on the faces of people when I tell them what I do for a living. Most people don’t hide their shock or disdain for teenagers and usually they ask me, incredulously, just how I

If you’d like to really get to know your students, just ask them about their history. Where are their roots? Where are their people? Where is their heart? Because while students are, obviously, where they are now, they are also, and probably more importantly, the journey that got them there. And the journey, the history, is often what they hold nearest to their soul. Students,

One of the words I avoid using is awesome, (because it’s used so frequently for many things that aren’t, in my opinion, all that awesome at all), but awesome is the word I use to describe Vocabulary.com. Perhaps I should use “totally cool” instead, because that’s more my style, but either one fits. Vocabulary.com has been, for me, an ELA teacher and lover of all things word related,

Customer Reviews

Of Mice and Men Interactive Notebook:
"This was absolutely the best thing I used all year! I used this product with my resource Language Arts class. These are students who are in high school, but are reading at the fifth grade level. I am still required to teach them "Of Mice and Men." As a result of using this interactive notebook, my special education kids knew this book like the back of their hands! Thank you, thank you, thank you!!!"
Maggie C

"This made teaching OM&M in my ISNs so easy. I used every part of the unit. Thanks so much for the doing the work for me. Great resource."
Michael P.

Back to School Ice Breaker {First Day of Class Student Information Activity}

"Students loved this. It was a great way to get to know them and assess their writing at the same time."
Catherine T.

"My student's loved the student selfie! What a fun activity and I love that I was able to edit it! Thank you!"
Anna H.